“Take cover!” the Captain said, and we ran like hell, all of us, our military discipline sloughing away with each step.
I had no idea that the damned alien machines could move so fast. I’d never actually seen them “run.” But suddenly they were upon us, blazing away—and our attempts to fight back were crushed so easily that we might as well have been ants defending our pitiful little sand hills. Stromwick was killed at the onset, although he did manage to fire one RPG round at a strider. He damaged a tripod’s leg before being crushed beneath its splayed pad. The rest of the squad was either killed or harvested.
I was blown into a ditch, which ironically saved my life. Lesley found a hole somewhere else, which saved hers.
I thought then that we were the only two survivors of the attack, although I realized later that, as in so many other things, I really didn’t have the whole story.
* * * *
I guess I must have lain there for perhaps two hours. I waited until my hearing started to return and the machines finally abandoned the site, having salvaged what they could of their wrecked comrades (I don’t think they got very much).
I was so banged up that I could hardly walk, but I dragged myself the mile and a half back to our HQ, since I knew I could find rations there. I choked down what I could from one of the cans (to this day, I have no idea what I ate then), and then slept the rest of the day and through much of the night.
Towards dawn, a noise startled me awake. I grabbed my pistol and snuck to the back of the house, where someone or something was trying to get in. I almost shot Reverend Lesley when she pulled the door open, but there was just enough light to discern her features.
“Lesley!” I said. “You survived!”
I was almost happy to see her, as despicable as she was.
“Smith!” she said, and flung her arms around me in a misguided exhibition of passion that she instantly regretted. “Uh, s-s-sorry!” she hissed, drawing herself back again.
“Did you see anybody else?” I asked.
“No one,” she said. “I think they’re all dead.”
“We should really find out for sure.”
“I don’t want to go back there again.”
But I pressed the issue, so sometime around noon we carefully and very slowly made our way back to the site of the engagement with the aliens. I counted at least fifteen bodies or body parts. Many of them had been dismembered.
“Where are the rest?”
“They may have been harvested if they were still alive,” I said. “Or perhaps they’re buried under the rubble, or scattered—or maybe a few of them escaped, just like us.”
“They were not good people,” the minister said.
“They were braver than either of us,” I said, and she dropped her eyes to the ground. She didn’t say much after that.
We went back to the house.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“I want to see what’s happening in San Francisco.”
“Why?”
“That’s where the Martians have been gathering.”
“But….”
“It’s also where the resistance will be, if there’s anything left of it,” I said.
“Oh,” and after that she gave up. She didn’t want to be left alone.
We left the next day, carrying what we could, heading towards Sausalito. We had to proceed very slowly, both because occasional groups of striders would come marching through at irregular intervals, and because I was so stiff from being banged around that I had a hard time sustaining any long march.
We stopped overnight in a junkyard, where we found refuge in the main office.
We were sound asleep when they attacked—a band of at least ten humans armed with small weapons. They took our food and arms and spare clothes—anything that might be useful.
“You’re even worse than the Martians,” I said.
“God will punish you!” Lesley said.
“We’ve got kids,” one of them said. “What would you do?”
“Obey God’s laws,” the minister said.
“Yeah, right!”
So we had to find a new place of refuge, and a new store of supplies.
Not far from Sausalito we located a large white house within an arbor, not at all obvious from the road, and in the kitchen found some loaves of bread that were still passable if one trimmed the mold off the edges, some soup, and a canned ham. The fridge also housed several six-packs of warm beer and iced tea, a spoiled casserole of baked beans (God, what a stench!), and some brown lettuce in the produce tray. We weren’t sure how much of this was still edible, but we were a lot less fussy about such things by then.
The cupboard also contained some cheap bottles of wine, a couple dozen cans of fruit and salmon and such, unopened jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise, two boxes of crackers, a jar of pickles, a sack of flour, and several packages of cookies, among other odds and ends, including three or four ant trails. Oh, well, they were as entitled to their feast as we were.
That night we sat in the darkness around the kitchen table—we didn’t dare light a candle—and munched on bread and ham and cheese, all of which still tasted pretty good, washing it down with two bottles of warm ale. It was certainly better than nothing, although the minister made her usual face. Reverend Lesley had now decided, oddly enough, that we should move south immediately, but I thought we ought to rebuild our strength first (we were both dog-tired), and wait until morning.
Then it happened, just like that!
We heard a whistling sound coming at us out of the sky. A blinding flash of green light made everything in the kitchen stand out in vivid shadows of emerald and black. The enormous explosion shoved us to the floor with a crash of breaking glass and falling masonry. The entire house rattled and settled, and a shower of ceiling plaster rained down on our bare heads. My first thought was that the San Andreas Fault had finally snapped its leash and precipitated the damned earthquake that everyone’s been predicting for years.
I was knocked against the oven and stunned senseless. I lay there unconscious for a long time, the minister later told me. When I came to, I was swimming in darkness again. She was dabbing water all over my throbbing head, begging me to wake up.
For a long time I couldn’t remember who I was or what had happened to me. Things came back to me very, very slowly. The bruise on my temple throbbed unceasingly.
“Are you feeling better?” Lesley whispered.
I couldn’t answer. Then I sat up, and the whole room swam. I vomited suddenly to one side.
“Oh, shit,” was all I could say.
I felt terribly sick and disoriented.
“Don’t move,” she said. “The floor’s covered with glass. You can’t get up without making some noise, and I think they’re outside.”
“Who?” I said rather stupidly.
The obvious answer just didn’t occur to me in my weakened state.
“The Martians!”
I couldn’t argue with her, couldn’t argue with anyone, really, since I was feeling so bad. We both sat there perfectly still, each nursing our respective hurts (Lesley had been cut on the forehead). I could hardly hear her breathing. Everything was silent, except once when something very near to us, maybe a piece of plaster, slid to the floor with a rattling sound. Outside I could sense an intermittent, metallic rustle.
“Hear that?” the minister asked, when the noise repeated itself.
“Yes,” I said, still groggy.
“It’s the Martians!”
I listened more intently.
“Doesn’t sound like the sting-ray.”
“It’s them!”
I somehow thought that one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled against our house, like the one that had demolished Lesley’s church in San Rafael. I still wasn’t thinking straight.
All that night we scarcely moved from our positions. When the minister had to pee, she used an empty pan. At dawn a pale light finally began filte
ring into the kitchen, not from the window, which remained totally black, but through a triangular hole that had been created between a crossbeam and a pile of broken bricks in the wall behind us. The interior of our prison cell was then revealed to us in all its glory.
The window had been forced inward by a mass of plants and soil and rocks, which had flowed over the table at which we’d been sitting. Outside, dirt was banked high against the house. Up above we could just see the dangling edge of a severed drainpipe. The floor was littered with smashed and bent pots and pans and broken glass. The other end of the kitchen appeared totally blocked, and we deduced from this that the rest of the house had probably collapsed from the impact. But the impact of what?
Contrasting with this ruin was the brightly colored refrigerator, the pastel green cupboards, and the wallpaper, which was designed to imitate alternating blue and white tiles. A couple of yellow recipe sheets were tacked to the walls, looking like large insects that had been mounted there by some insane entomologist. The combination of this color scheme was utterly bilious to me.
As the light improved, we could see a gap in the wall, and through it a Martian fighting-machine standing sentinel over the still-glowing spaceship in the pit. It was then that I realized what’d happened. The sight so terrified us that we crawled as carefully as we could out of the twilight of the ruined kitchen into the safer recesses of the storeroom right behind it.
“The ship!” I whispered to myself. “It hit the house and buried us under the ruins!”
For a time the minister was silent.
“Lord God have mercy upon us!” she finally said.
Then I heard her whimpering again, or maybe she was praying. She was getting on my nerves once more.
We lay very still for many hours. I could scarcely breathe, I was so scared; and I sat with my eyes fixed on the faint light of the kitchen door, just daring the Martians to enter. I could barely make out Lesley’s face, a dim, dark, oval shape, with her white collar and cuffs. Outside there began a rough metal hammering, then a violent hooting sound (“Ooh-Hooh”), and after a brief interval, a hissing like the escape of steam. These noises continued intermittently through the night, but seemed to increase in volume as time went on.
Soon our time was punctuated by the measured thudding of the Martian engines, together with an underlying vibration that made everything around us constantly shake and quiver. Once darkness fell, the ghostly kitchen was shrouded in black, and we felt safe enough to emerge from our cocoon for the first time in many hours. We’d crouched in the storeroom all day, silent and shivering and utterly worn out.
I was wide awake again—hungry and thirsty and with a pressing need to empty my bladder. The ache in my belly became so urgent that it forced me to immediate action. Then I told the minister that I was going for water, and felt my way back into the kitchen. She made no answer, but as soon as I began drinking, the faint noise that I made stirred her as well, and I heard her crawling towards me.
We felt around for food and drink, and wolfed it down, mold and all. Once Lesley tried to take something from my hand, and I think I growled at her and slapped her fist away. We’d been reduced to scrounging like animals. For a time I was an animal, just another beast striving to survive for another hour or another day and another morsel of food. I also didn’t hesitate to empty my bowels in front of her into whatever vacant canister or bottle was available.
I hated the feeling of being trapped.
I hated the thought of dying.
And, most of all, oh yes, most of all, I hated Reverend Lesley!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE RUINED HOUSE
Habitant of castle gray, creeping thing in sober way.
—William Ellery Channing
Alex Smith, 3 Bi-January, Mars Year i
Marin County, California, Planet Earth
After eating our fill we crept back into the storage area, and I dozed again. When I awoke I was alone. The thudding continued without cease, giving me a persistent, throbbing headache to go with the head injury that I’d received. I whispered Lesley’s name several times, and at last felt my way to the door of the kitchen. It was now daylight, and I saw her lying with her face pressed against the hole that looked out onto the Martian pit. Her shoulders were hunched over, and her head was hidden from me.
I could hear loud, rhythmic noises outside, like those generated by a garage; and the ruined kitchen continued to rock with an incessant thud-thud-thudding sound that reminded me of the bass reverberations of hip-hop music—what I call “rap-shit.” Through the gap in the wall I could just see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. I could even hear a bird or two chirping away over the clatter. I advanced carefully amidst the broken glass littering the floor, struggling to keep silent.
I touched Lesley’s leg, and she jumped so violently that a piece of plaster went sliding down the outside of the house and fell into the pit with a loud rattling noise. I gripped her arm, fearing that she might cry out, and for a long time we crouched there motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our wall remained. The falling masonry had opened a vertical slit in the debris; by raising myself cautiously over a beam I was able to peer through the gap onto what a few nights ago had been a quiet suburban California street.
The ship had plopped onto the home next door, utterly obliterating the building. It now lay buried in a hole that was already larger than the pit I’d seen at Novato. The earth surrounding it had splashed upward under the impact of the landing—”splashed” is the only word that describes it—creating mounds of dirt that hid the adjoining houses from sight.
Our own structure had collapsed onto its front section, destroying most of the ground floor; but the kitchen and storeroom and the entrance to the basement had somehow escaped, although buried under tons of soil. It was closed off except in the direction of the ship. We were perched on the edge of the huge circular excavation that the aliens were creating. The heavy equipment generating the beating noise was hidden from us. A pale green vapor rose like a veil across our peephole, giving off a faint metallic odor.
The spaceship had already unfolded itself: on the far rim stood one of the great striders, its hatch ajar, looming stiff and stark against the evening sky. At first I hardly noticed it, because of the extraordinary device I saw at the center of the pit.
It was one of those things that have since been labeled “handling-machines,” the study of which has given us some basic knowledge of Martian science. It had the appearance of a spider with six jointed, articulate legs, plus an arrangement of metal attachments and tentacles protruding from its body. These arms were often retracted, but this particular machine was using three of its “hands” to fish out a number of rods, plates, and bars that had lined the interior of the ship, apparently serving to strengthen its structure during its transit to Earth. The bars were being deposited on the surface next to the pit.
Its motion was so swift and perfect that at first I didn’t even regard it as a machine, in spite of its glitter. The fighting-machines were marvelous things, to be sure, but nothing compared to this. Folks who’ve never seen these devices scarcely have any idea of the “living” quality they evinced.
You may recall the photos published in People in one of the first accounts of the war. Malletoni made a very hasty study of the striders, with appropriate illustrations of the surviving wrecks. The article presented them as rigid tripods, lacking flexibility or subtlety, suggesting that Earth had been attacked by a horde of stiff-necked robots. Of course, nothing was further from the truth. The issue sold out immediately. The documentaries on CNN and the National Geographic Channel were similarly “dry” and uninformative, giving a barebones description of the Martian devices, but little more. They universally failed to convey the vitality of the alien machinery.
At first, as I said, the handling-device didn’t impress me much as a machine. It appeared almost like a large crab with a glittering carapace. A Ma
rtian sat inside and directed the thing with its own tentacles, the equivalent of the creature’s central brain. But then I realized just how much the mechanism resembled the other Martian devices, and even the aliens themselves, with its gray-brown, shiny, almost leathery covering—and the true nature of the “handler” suddenly dawned on me. The artifact combined both organic materials and metal alloys, blending them together in an intricate combination of power and efficiency and beauty. None of our engineers has ever been able to duplicate one of these machines, or even to get one of the relics left by the aliens working again.
I wanted objectively to record the events that I witnessed here. Suddenly I was aware of a rancid odor emanating from the pit, like a pail of shellfish that’s been left out in the sun too long. It was sickening.
I then examined the Martians themselves more closely. Already I’d formed a general impression of these creatures. The initial nausea I’d experienced no longer bothered me, although the pervasive stench was unsettling at times. Since I was fully hidden, I could easily observe the comings and goings in the pit.
The aliens’ bodies consisted of a huge, humped, round head about four feet in diameter, with a silly, oversized, almost cartoonish grin plastered over the front. They had no nose as such—the Martians didn’t seem to have any sense of smell, and I wasn’t really sure at that point how they breathed. I saw a pair of very large, dark-hued eyes, almost black in color, and beneath them a kind of fleshy beak, similar to that of an octopus or squid. The creatures were finally dissected by Herr Doktor Franz-Ferdinand von Jarmann in the months following the war; he stated that they combined elements of shellfish, insects, and crustaceans, all mixed together in ways that should have been biologically impossible.
At the back of the “body”—I don’t know how else to describe it—was a small “drum” that served as an ear, although it must have been almost useless in our dense atmosphere. Grouped around the mouth was a set of short feelers, almost like wormy whiskers. At the base of the creature’s body were sixteen slender, whip-like tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. Four were longer than the others. These Martian “hands,” as Jarmann termed them, seemed both flexible and versatile. The aliens seemed to be trying to raise their bodies using these “hands,” but this was difficult with the increased weight generated by our gravity. On Mars they could have moved around with ease, but on Earth it’s a wonder they could even breathe.
Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens Page 15
